Between African Americans and Japanese: Traveling Texts

This is a two-day symposium on the cross-pollination between Japanese and African-American literature and culture. Paper presentations will address a diverse sampling of cross-cultural productions including music, popular culture, literature, and film, and favor open ended explorations of how such cultural productions come to signify in new and intellectually intriguing ways.

Our participants are engaged in scholarly work that asks such questions as: Why and how did author Nakagami Kenji find resonance and identification with women African-American writers such as Toni Morrison? How can contemporary Japanese continue to find Little Black Sambo dolls “cute”? Why does the American artist, iona rozeal brown, utilize ukiyo-e in her depictions of blackface? What is it about anime that so fascinates young Americans? How does Zen speak to Americans? Can an ethnically Japanese author write “black literature”? The papers presented will include ones ranging from Japanese “blackface,” to Richard Wright’s English language haiku, to the Japanese embrace of the “black national anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”